Do and hope?

One of my matriarchal family lines (Caldwell-Tatum) has a centuries-old family motto:

Do and hope. Fac Et Spera. 

A lot can be read into these three simple words, even without the fancy armored arm waving a sword through a crown crest that goes along with them. As a kid and then a young woman I was drawn to the words hope and do individually, and in that order. I pictured noble ancestors hoping for a better life for themselves, their family, their country and doing the work, adventuring, rebelling, immigrating, bootlegging, and learning to make those hopes happen. I took heart in my naive hopes of saving the world and dared to tilt at windmills and bang my head into brick walls of bureaucracy and apathy. I even rallied others at times vicariously with my off-gassing of hope and determination. Hoping and doing was initially a very satisfying mantra or motto, and then I discovered I had it backward.

I'm now arguably middle-aged and have suffered through obtaining three degrees and a host of traumatic experiences in extreme environments where I could literally do nothing and the worst outcome was hopelessly inevitable. As a consequence of my jobs, I necessarily do a lot of observing only (e.g. job analysis, teamwork assessment, organizational research, executive coaching). There was nothing I could do to prevent a detective from being shot to death during my ride-along or put life back into the many broken and defeated bodies I followed first responders to, or bring back an astronaut or faculty member I had worked with after a tragic incident, or to help a healthcare professional or veteran actually get past the repeating memory of a gruesome trauma. There was nothing I could do that had any hope of saving two of my best friends from a boat fire or my dog from drowning or my in-laws from a long, slow, scary cognitive decline, or young family members from being exploited and disparaged into self-destructive behaviors. There is certainly nothing I can do that has any obvious or immediate hope of stopping deadly wars, natural disasters, famines, greed, or ignorance. Living has made it abundantly clear that waiting on hope to inspire me to do is completely hopeless.

Hope feeds on the fumes of doing, not the other way around. Sitting in the bulletproof back of that police cruiser while one detective struggled to drag his partner out of the line of fire, I thought of things I could do to better select and train officers to survive and to support their families and colleagues when they did not. When the horror was over, I set about doing those things as much as possible and convincing others to pay attention to doing them too; and I found the hope to do more from there. I've learned that the doing must come first or my hope will certainly die. I must do in order to feed my future hope.

I still read a lot into those three words. I cling to them in their exact order now, do and hope. They save me from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. They remind me that if I wait to hope, I may never do what is really necessary or actually helpful again. I do the best I can to change what I can for the better while I can with what I have and hope that makes my own or someone else's adventure living a little easier or better from that point on. I do, and I make mistakes or sometimes I just end up doing the wrong thing, but then I do something else or something differently next time, knowing that I will probably learn something that has an even better hope of influencing lives. I write and hope it will speak to what someone else needs at some point in time when they most need it, but I do not wait until I feel hopeful someone would like to read it before I write it. I certainly do not wait to write until I have hopes of achieving success (whatever that is). I write and hope I can revise it to be even better later as I learn. I do, then I hope, and that is how my next day always dawns beautiful and clean and full of purpose now.

Do and hope.

11 Lessons Learned from Extreme Environment Work

I have had the honor and the privilege of observing (and sometimes participating) in a lot of training for living and working in extreme environments. I've learned a lot, but I 'd like to share some of the things that are common in training for extreme environments.
What makes an environment extreme? Existing in it is dangerous because of constant physical, emotional, and/ or mental threats to your presence (e.g. Space, the Arctic Tundra, a war zone, a fire scene). An environment might also be extreme because it requires an ultra-high level of performance and even small errors can be deadly (e.g. emergency rooms, fighter jets). Training to perform in any one such environment or job reveals many interesting lessons. However, I think what astronauts, special forces operators, first-responders, law enforcement agents, Antarctic expeditionary members, divers, pilots, off-shore rig crews, and ER and ICU staff all learn in common may make great lessons for life in general...

1. If we're all breathing, then we've got enough time to handle the other problems. This is a difficult perspective to keep, but absolutely necessary. NASA has an additional way of framing it: The first over-arching, non-negotiable mission objective is to keep everyone alive. For that objective, failure is not an option. The second objective can be the mission goals (i.e. what you, your team, your organization, your country, your planet wants); but everything is subservient to and depends on that first objective of making sure every one is and can continue breathing.
2. Craft your work and your job to honor your own meaning of life or you will die inside (or burnout). What is the meaning of life? Like Albert Camus wisely witted, "The meaning of life is whatever keeps you from killing yourself." You define it. It can be love and family, rugby and roller derby, ballroom dancing and tacos, hope and learning and anything at all in the universe that makes your life your adventure. What matters is that you define it, reassess how well you are honoring it for yourself, and redefine it as needed to keep your meaning alive and use it to shape your work. All work can be shaped to fit your meaning, but first you must know your meaning.
3. Hell is exciting, but boredom is heavenly. Pray for boredom. Use it wisely. The fate of the world depends on each one of us doing so. Boredom is when self-reflection and self-care happen.
4. You must do self-care well before you can do team-care. It's very tempting to go all out and "sleep when I'm dead" and eat like every meal is your last and over-caffeinated and on and on and on. We're good at pushing ourselves and each other, but if you make a habit out of living and working like that then you will die 15 to 50 years earlier than you could have. Take a lesson from flying, you have to put your oxygen mask on first in the airplane or you will pass out before you can help your children put theirs on. 
5. Meet others where they are at right now unless you want to be miserable. A mother afraid that her baby is about to drown will not listen to any advice on potty-training or managing her own diabetes. It doesn't matter how big of an expert you are, or how well-educated you are, or how good your intentions are. Inevitably, some people are not in a comfortable enough position to listen and hear certain things. Pay attention to others' situation and their current ability to hear and process information before you speak.  By the way, this requires that you find out about their current situation and capacity first (e.g. do a situation assessment in firefighter speak).
6. Get comfortable with repeating yourself. You really will have to convince everyone of everything all of the time, and the sooner you accept that and learn to communicate persuasively the happier and more successful you will be. The key here is in knowing what must always be communicated repeatedly: your goal, the reasons for your goal, and how achieving your goal impacts the future (i.e. your recommendation, your rationale, and the intended/ anticipated impact).
7. Make decisions, not judgements. Reserve your judgement as long as possible. Make and share decisions as far in advance as possible so that you have time to explicitly and repeatedly invite others to critique and improve those decisions.
8. All criticism is scary and constructive if you mine it right. There is always a diamond hidden in even the cheapest coal, and even a diamond given to you on a satin pillow is shocking. Accepting, appreciating, and using criticism well takes a life-long dedication and lots of practice. Even bad, offensive criticism helps us learn what we don't want to do ourselves when others ask us for feedback (like not snapping and yelling at young students). Bad or unnecessarily harsh criticism should also be a bold reminder to remember to ask for feedback on what you are getting right and doing well (even more important than what you could do better). You wouldn't try to coach yourself to run a marathon by asking only what is wrong with your running...you want to pull information from others about what you're doing right too. It is far easier to leverage your strengths to overcome or work around weaknesses than it is to fix a weakness out right.
9. You can't do it long for the money, fame, or status, but you can do it forever because you care. Extreme environment workers, often care-takers like first-responders, quickly learn that it is a gray, gray, gray world. A big, fuzzy, chaotic bad-with-the-good mess. And we are not really a thin blue, red, green, or black line of dedicated helpers standing between everyone else and danger or harm (as advertised and idealized). We are at best, a candle light in the murk. We learn that we can't stop doing it, even when we're tired and frustrated, because we care so damn much. And we also learn that we feed our own and each others' souls and resilience by appreciating each other for caring so damn much. We learn to express our gratitude daily and eventually, our gratitude make us brighter, bolder, stronger, and keeps the gray at bay.
10. Plan your planning and plan to review your plans. It sounds silly and obsessive, especially once you realize that 95% of your plans will get trashed in the first 5 minutes on scene or in action. However, it isn't about the plan per se, but rather the act of planning as a team that ensures great results. Agree on objectives, SMART goals, and milestones so that everyone involved can quickly see when things aren't going to plan and decide how to adapt before failure is imminent. Agree on checkpoints, safe-words (i.e. everyone stop all action and pay attention words), and normal communication expectations (i.e. who will tell who what, how, and when under normal conditions and under stress). Finally, take a moment during planning to ask what is the most-likely, worst-case obstacle or challenge you can expect. Make a plan for surviving that and then when your plan inevitably gets screwed up you will stress less because you already have a plan for adapting to your worst nightmare.
11. Curiosity is what cultivates nirvana. When all you want is to learn, then failure becomes expected and tolerable.  Curiosity also crowds out the other less-meaningful wants and your fears. Real, lasting success of any kind requires many creative and fortuitous failures (also known as iterations)...that is innovation.

There are many more, I'm sure. What others have you seen hold true in extreme environments or under stressful living and working conditions? Sharing is caring!

Cacti grow strong in extreme environments. Why not us too?

The Slow Road Home

Mother's Day weekend. The traffic on Interstate 10 between Seguin and Houston was snarled. Bullishly stop and go and puke provoking. I realized there was probably little to to lose in taking the longer meandering old Highway 90 route home--maybe I could see something besides the angry red break-lights of dozens of Ford F-150s and bored passengers boring away at smartphone screens.

A few turns later and there was an expanse of open black-top divided by two golden lines stretching onward under towering green Oaks, Cedar Elms, and Caddo Pecan trees. In the gaps between foliage, the Colorado River glinted silver and gold in the afternoon sunlight. I rolled down my window and the wind rushed in full of the smell of earth and river, resounding with the lazy chirps of crickets and the lonely hum of my tires on the road.

I could feel the size of the smile on my tired face becoming nearly painful. Taking another chance, I turned on the AM radio rather than the XM satellite and from some station near the end of the dial came Woody Herman's swinging 1945 hit, "The Good Earth."

Nostalgia hit like a hammer. 

On just this kind of day in October of 1945, my grandparents took a similar drive along another part of the Colorado River from Bartlett to the county courthouse in Llano, Texas on State Highway 29. 

My grandpa used to tell me that story. He was 36 years old, a divorcee in 1945. His first spouse had wandered away somewhere between the Great Depression and World War II just like my grandma's. They were lucky to find one another, and driving to the Justice of the Peace that day to be married felt like freedom to him. His 1937 Chevy with the mohair interior didn't have a radio and maxed out around 85 horsepower. 

No air-conditioning or heating. 

Their windows would have been rolled down too.

They've both been dead for over a dozen years now, and yet, there they were riding along with me in the sunshine on the slow road home--laughing and contradicting one another. 

"The drive was long. Cars went slower then and the roads were smaller. There was no honey-moon." Grandma shaking her head.

Grandpa looking skeptical. "Yes, there was. There was the drive home. Don't you remember stopping to see the damn and Inks Lake?"

"If I did, then I don't now." Grandma's eyes full of mirth as she fixes him a loving glance.

I'm so glad I took the slow road home. I have missed them.

Parts of the old Spanish trail that eventually turned into one of the first transcontinental highways (Highway 90) and then Interstate 10 are still visible in their 1921 era glory.

My grandfather as young man on the road.

My grandmother, sometimes a reluctant traveler.

My grandparents' 25th wedding anniversary.